Boot.dev Blog
7 Critical Reasons Beginner Programmers Should Learn JavaScript in 2026
by Zulie Rane - Data analysis and computer science techincal author
"Why learn JavaScript?" I asked my sister when she was in college and starting to pick up the fundamentals of JavaScript. "Isn't it ancient? Do people still use it?"
Comprehensive Guide to Dates and Times in Go
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Keeping track of time in code has long been every developer's nightmare. While no language or package manages time perfectly, I think Golang does a pretty good job out-of-the-box. This full tutorial should answer ~90% of the questions you'll have about time management in Go.
The 10x Meeting - Solving for Too Many Meetings
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Perhaps you've heard of the fabled 10x developer (or 10x engineer) - the one on the team that's 10x as productive as their average colleague. While many, including myself, doubt the existence of such people, I do think there are meetings that are 10x as productive as the average meeting. My goal in this article is to break down their properties so we can have 10x fewer meetings.
Concatenating with strings.Builder Quickly in Golang
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
The Go standard library makes concatenating strings easy. Concatenation is just a fancy word for adding strings together to make a larger string. For example, if we concatenate "hello", " " and "world" we'd get "hello world".
Golang vs Python: Which Language is Best For You?
by Zulie Rane - Data analysis and computer science techincal author
In a world where the ability to write any code at all is a tremendous advantage, often the biggest problem coders face is knowing which language to start learning, rather than whether to learn one at all. There are different languages for just about every purpose you could think of. Of those popular coding languages, programmers often face an intense battle of Golang vs Python. (The official name is Go, but the website is Golang.org, so programmers typically refer to it as either interchangeably.)
The Ultimate Guide to JSON in Go
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
As a language designed for the web, Go provides extensive support for working with JSON data. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is an incredibly popular data exchange format whose syntax resembles simple JavaScript objects. It's one of the most common ways for applications to communicate on the modern web.
Migrating From Vue-CLI & Webpack to Vitejs
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Boot.dev's web app that hosts all of my coding courses is a single-page application written in Vue 2, with plans to migrate to Vue 3 soon™©®. In the meantime, I happened across a cool new tooling app called Vite that promised a few things that caught my attention.
How Replace a String in Go - Top 5 Examples
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Go has a powerful standard library that makes string manipulation easy right out of the box. One of the functions I use most often is the strings package's Replace() function. strings.Replace() returns a copy of its input string after replacing all instances of a given substring with a new one.
String Enums in Go
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
My least favorite part of Go? Glad you asked. It's Go's lack of enums, sum types, tagged unions, etc. Compared to other statically typed languages like:
Splitting a String into a Slice in Golang
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
I can't begin to tell you how often I split strings in Go. More often than not I'm just parsing a comma-separated list from an environment variable, and Go's standard library gives us some great tools for that kind of manipulation.
Backend Developers are UX Designers Too
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Too often I neglect the idea of UX design in backend work. The goal of user experience design is to give users a product that's easy to use. In the world of front-end development, that typically means making it obvious how to navigate your site, using commonly-understood icons, or implementing well-contrasted colors for foreground and background, making your site easy to read.
For Loops in Go
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
For loops are a programmer's best friend! They allow us to execute blocks of code repeatedly and iterate over collections of items. In Go, there are several different ways to write one.
Advanced Algorithms Course Released on Boot.dev
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Sorry it took so long for me to get this one out! Data Structures and Algorithms 2 was just released, and I'm excited to let you all get your hands on it, even if you're just auditing it for free! The more advanced material takes quite a bit longer to produce, I wanted to triple-check to make sure I got everything correct and that I've presented it in a way that makes it easy to understand.
Are Coding Bootcamps Worth It in 2026? What the Data Says
by Maya Chen - Computer science and programming educator at Boot.dev
A review of audited bootcamp outcomes, tuition estimates, industry changes, and alternatives for prospective students in 2026.
Can You Get a Programming Job with Just an Associate's Degree?
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Changing majors is a tale as old as time. A degree that would normally require four years to complete can quickly turn into a more expensive endeavor that takes five or six years for a student that can't decide what they want to study. The interesting thing about programming jobs is that they don't require a degree at all, but if you at least complete an associate's degree, you'll have a better chance of landing that first job.
How I Organize My Local Development Environment
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
When I was just getting into coding, I was very disorganized. I would create a new text file in My Documents, work on it, never create a Git repository, accidentally delete it later, you get the idea. Nowadays I'm quite the opposite. To be honest, the thing that made me get my act together was the quite unpopular and now deprecated GOPATH that early versions of Go required developers to work in. I think it was the right move to not force that organization as a requirement, but I actually quite liked the method personally, and still use a version of it to this day.
All Coding Courses on boot.dev Are Now Free to Audit
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Last weekend I did a major revamp of boot.dev's payment strategy, after toying with the first version since I launched in the summer of 2020, as it turns out, the microtransaction (gem) strategy didn't work out to the benefit of my students, nor to the growth of boot.dev. As a result, I've flipped my funding strategy on its head and decided to make all of boot.dev's content free to audit. Let's take a look at exactly what that means.
Where Can You Get a Programming Certificate Online?
by Zulie Rane - Data analysis and computer science techincal author
There are two ways to get a programming certificate online - universities and online courses. In the simplest possible terms, a programming certificate is something that lets you walk up to an employer and say, "Hello, yes, I know how to SQL. Here's a piece of paper that proves it. You should hire me."
Using a High-Level RabbitMQ Client in Golang
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
So you might already know that the amqp package is awesome and you can get up and running with just 40-50 lines of simple code. Unfortunately, the bare-bones amqp library doesn't handle a lot of the stuff you probably wish it did, things like reconnecting logic, the spawning of threads, queue and binding boilerplate, and flow control.
The Two Classes of Software Engineer
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
"Software engineer" has become a ubiquitous term for people who write, deploy, architect, or sometimes even simply test code. In reality, I think there are two classes of "software engineers"; those who understand computer science well enough to do challenging, innovative work, and those who just get by because they're familiar with a few high-level tools. The laziness with which the tech industry has adopted the term "software engineer" has made it harder for us to distinguish between the two.
Top 8 Benefits of Functional Programming
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Functional programming is a way to write code where programs are created strictly through functions. Functional programming has gained quite a bit of traction in recent years among the development community, mostly because of the benefits it provides.
Top 8 Tricks to Learn Coding Fast
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
The journey to becoming a gainfully employed software engineer can feel long. The good news is, you can learn smarter not harder. Apply these eight tricks and you'll be learning to program a lot faster than the average bear.
Is There a Case for Programmers to Unionize?
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
I've seen a lot of buzz recently about software developers wanting to form unions. I'm particularly interested in this topic while I'm #indiehacking boot.dev, where my goal is to provide a free-to-audit university-quality CS education. I also want to point out that at the time of writing I'm a full-time software developer working for a separate company (not boot.dev). I'm not a manager and boot.dev is just a side-project. As of right now, I'm pretty sure I'm a member of the proletariat.
View Git Tags with Semver Ordering
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
If you're like me, you wish all Git tags adhered to the Semantic Versioning standard. Unfortunately, Semver is just a convention, so Git tags can basically be any string of text. By default when you use the git tag command, your output will be in alphabetical order. Being a gopher, almost all the projects I work on are tagged according to Semver standards, which means the default output is fairly useless.
Why should you learn Golang? [2026]
by Meghan Reichenbach
Golang has skyrocketed in popularity year over year, making it one of the best choices for career-conscious developers to learn. As an example, StackOverflow's Developer survey saw it climb in popularity among developers from 10th in 2019 all the way to 5th in 2020. Additionally, a full 32% of developers surveyed in Insights Dice want to learn it. Go developers are paid well - globally, the StackOverflow survey found that Perl, Scala, and Go programmers have the highest salaries.
